Timeline

Ideas

The D ecosystem is always in need of improvement through the revision of existing projects and the creation of new ones. The core projects like the(standard library) and the compilers (Compilers) are always in need of attention. Other important areas include GUI support, integration with other languages, improving and enhancing the tooling, IDE and editor support, and more.

Please add your project ideas to the list below, being as descriptive as you can in the summaries. Students interested in participating can use the ideas listed here as jumping off points, so the more information you provide, the easier it will be for them to get started. If your idea is particularly complex or nuanced, consider leaving contact information so that interested parties may follow up.

Graphics library for resource constrained embedded systems

Create a 2D rasterizer, rich drawing primitives, and 2D graphics library suitable for resource constrained embedded systems (e.g. ARM Cortex-M) to be used in industrial controls, home appliances, medical devices, consumer electronics, and IoT just to name a few. The end goal would be something similar to Segger's emWin. The library would be used to drive LDCs similar to https://www.adafruit.com/product/3396
Requirements:

Hardware agnostic; should simply render to a frame buffer

No dependencies (No Phobos, no C standard library, and no official D runtime).

Consider using -betterC, but a custom minimal D runtime is also a viable option

Tabular data container (data frames)

Pandas, R and Julia have made data frames very popular.
As D is getting more interest from data scientist (e.g. eBay or AdRoll) it would be very beneficial to use one language for the entire data analysis pipeline - especially considering that D (in contrast to popular languages like Python, R or Julia) - is compiled to native machine code and gets optimized by the sophisticated LLVM backend.

Minimum requirements:

conversion to and from CSV

multi-indexing

column binary operations, e.g. `column1 * column2`

group-by on an arbitrary number of columns

column/group aggregations

Proposed Project Mentor: TBA

C++ interops

There are many experiments in transparently interfacing D with C++, notably:

D would greatly benefit by seamlessly integrating the C++ ecosystem. There are many ways to accomplish this goal and it should be discussed with the community.
Andrei already commented on the importance of a tool like Calypso in this thread:
https://forum.dlang.org/post/m9s4cd$2s1v$1@digitalmars.com

Proposed Project Mentor: TBA

Persistent Data Structures

There is an ongoing effort to reduce the reliance of Phobos on the GC but the GC is not going anywhere given that it has many advantages over manual memory management.
The community would greatly benefit from a wide range of functional programming techniques that have their roots in the usage of immutable and persistent data structures that heavily rely on the GC.
Persistent Data Structures are heavily used in Scala and Clojure and they allow the programmer to reason about interactivity, sharing and parallelism.

The focus of this project would be to create a varying range of persistent data structures (sets, vectors, maps, strings, trees, lists, etc...) that respects the range interface and the semantics of Phobos.